Ανταποκρίσεις. Correspondences.: The East

I expected my blog this month to be a lament for pro-Europeanism. But it looks like 31 October will pass with the Conservative government’s wretched business unsettled. Fragile hope continues. My lament is stayed.

I’ve been re-learning German in the past few months. My reason for doing so is – perhaps oddly – substantially Greek. I’m working on a previously unknown translation that Ritsos did in the 1960s of an important German writer (I plan to publish something on this next year). Ritsos himself didn’t know German, but when he was translating from a language he didn’t know (with the aid of French or Greek cribs), he usually wanted at least to hear the original, so he could understand something of its sound-system and rhythmic qualities. My German was already just about good enough to do that, but I thought I should try harder.

I first started to learn German at school in the lower sixth. It was one of those occasions when the teacher was even less keen to teach than the pupils to learn, and I didn’t learn much. The uninspiring phrase “Deutschland ist ein Staat in Westeuropa” (it was the early 1980s) has stayed with me from that time, but little else did. I then tried again – somewhat harder – as a postgrad at Oxford. Surrounded by dictionaries, grammars and a helpful textbook on how to learn to read German quickly, I tackled some of the oddly untranslated staples of German Klassische Altertumswissenschaft (roughly: Classics). In his terrifying weekly postgrad classes, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, the then Regius Professor of Greek, used to hurl odd words of German at students he was praising or (more often) insulting, but at that time I never really learned to speak the language or to understand spoken German.

For the past 20 years or so, I’ve travelled often to Germany: for business and pleasure. My husband is a fluent German speaker, we have great German friends, and we know the country well. And over time, I’ve grown embarrassed about always dragging conversation there into English (or sometimes French). So for the past six months, I have been caring once again about the intricacy of German word order and the insatiable German appetite for coining lengthy compound nouns. It’s fun (Spaß) to learn with the Goethe Institute and it exercises the mind. But it’s also a means of access to one of our great European intellectual cultures.

Since one thing always leads to another, I’ve been moving between learning German vocabulary and reading up on German culture, when not plodding away at my article on Ritsos’ translation from German and at a separate translation I’m doing of a long Ritsos poem. Indeed I’ve just finished Neil MacGregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation (2014). This wonderful book tells the history of Germany largely through its culture, as developed through the twin ideas of monuments and memory. It’s like stumbling upon a jewel box. Not only do you grasp through it the great sweep of German history, but you also absorb the complexities of a nation that generated both sparkling enlightenment and the profoundest darkness. And the individual jewels – individual lives; individual examples of literature, sculpture, pottery, architecture, art and so on – shine brightly. MacGregor also writes very interestingly – in a new way, I think – on the German passion for Greece, and specifically for Greece above Rome. (This love affair was going through a particularly tortuous phase when I was ambassador in Greece.)

I have a long list of book projects ahead of me, but the final item on the list (number 4) is a ‘big book’ about Greece. I want to try to distil a lifetime’s admiration for Greece in a single book of some ambition, and I’ve been thinking rather idly about plausible models for doing so. Different though the two countries are, MacGregor’s history of Germany offers a very tempting model. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend that you do so. It’s a real tour de force.

But now back to Ritsos and his unexpected diversion into German culture…

John